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October 02, 2012

This week's Election Tuesday post is by Robert Pollin, author of Back to Full Employment. Pollin tackles the issue of job creation, claiming that the real discussion about rebuilding the economy around job opportunity creation will have to come not from the candidates, but from an engaged citizenry.

As a result of the 2008-09 Wall
Street crash and Great Recession, employment conditions in the United States
have been worse than at any time since the 1930s Depression. As of the most recent August data, the official
unemployment rate is 8.1 percent. A better
official measure—which includes people who have been discouraged from looking
for work and those taking part-time jobs (sometimes very part-time) when they
wanted full time—puts unemployment as of August at 14.7 percent. That is 23 million people, nearly double the
combined populations of New York City and Los Angeles.

Based on
historical experience, a U.S. president running for reelection would be tossed
out by voters in the face of such disastrous employment figures. But polls show that President Obama is
maintaining a small but firm edge over Mitt Romney, and that, if anything, the
margin is widening with time.

In part, we
can attribute this to both Romney’s ineptitude as a candidate and to the
hard-right politics advanced by Tea Party Republicans. But even accounting for these factors, I
would still venture that, while most voters do not believe that Obama and the
Democrats offer anything close to a coherent plan for overcoming mass
unemployment, they also understand that the Republicans—with their full
throttle embrace of an austerity agenda—have even less to offer.

The
situation was different during the 2008 Presidential campaign. At that time, Obama’s “hope” mantra conveyed,
if only vaguely, that he had a serious platform for counteracting the financial
crisis and recession. The fact is, Obama
did indeed have a plan and he managed to implement significant parts of it soon
after taking office in 2009. His big
initiatives were the $800 billion stimulus program and the auto industry bailout. For all their deficiencies, these programs
did succeed to a substantial extent. The
problem was that the full magnitude of the financial collapse was beyond what
the Obama team had estimated (and, full disclosure, beyond what I myself had initially
calculated). In addition, Obama gave himself little room to maneuver beyond
these initial actions, primarily because he kept trying too hard to avoid
offending the Wall Street crowd.

The moment
cries out for serious discussions throughout the country on how to dig out of
the ditch Wall Street has shoved the economy, and how to rebuild the economy
around a commitment to creating decent job opportunities for everyone. Don’t expect to hear much about this during
the rest of the campaign. The real
discussion will have to come from the bottom up, from an engaged citizenry,
pushing to create the foundations of a decent U.S. society.

September 25, 2012

In the following Election Tuesday post, Michael P. Lynch, author of In Praise of Reason, explains why we need shared standards of reason.

The Romney campaign declared last month that they weren’t
going to be pushed around by fact-checkers. Such remarks were in turns horrifying
and amusing to many, but their open acceptance by some on the Right was
revealing. What it reveals is that current political disputes aren’t just over
the facts. They are also over who has the best methods and way for determining what
the facts are. And many on the Right are suspicious of “fact-checking” as just
another way of using biased methods to impose a liberal view of the world.

This is frustrating. But rejecting it wholesale without
trying to understand the underlying problem is a mistake. The real problem here
is that when we can’t even agree over fact-finding methods, then we are
disagreeing over our very standards of reason—over what counts as rational or
justified and what doesn’t. And when
that happens, we’ve hit rock bottom—the debate has grounded out on principles
so basic it is hard to see how it can be resolved because neither side sees the
other as rational.

Democracies are supposed to be spaces of reasons. In
democratic politics, we ought to give and ask for reasons for our political
views. In order to do that, however, we need some common currency of shared standards—some
common principles to which we can all appeal when assessing each other’s
claims. Without that, reason-giving breaks down and politics becomes war by
other means. And that is what is happening in our country right now.

What this means is that
those of us who favor scientific methods can’t be content with just heaping
scorn on the other’s sides standards of rationality. Nor should we assume that
everyone will just see the virtues of a scientific approach to evidence and
reason. We need to do more, to actively how why—morally and politically and not
just scientifically—some standards of reason are more rational than others.
Ignore this, and we run the risk of more people giving up not only on
fact-checkers—but the facts themselves.

September 20, 2012

The political news this week has been dominated by a secret film of Mitt Romney speaking in May at a fundraising event in Florida. In it, Romney, speaking "off the cuff," described a bloc of Americans that support President Obama:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.

The remarks have generated a heated discussion about "the 47%" - who they are, how they vote, and the role of the government. We thought we should check in with Peter Wenz, author of Take Back the Center, a new book arguing for the return of a progressive tax code. Not surprisingly, he saw little of value in Romney's remarks:

If Mitt Romney had read Take Back the Center he’d have known better than to suppose that the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay any federal income tax are loafers looking for government handouts. In the first place, they pay other taxes and therefore support the government. If they have a job, they pay into the Social Security and Medicare funds. If they’re unemployed they still pay sales taxes and property taxes (either directly to the government or indirectly to their landlords).

Most of the 47 percent depend on Social Security after a lifetime of work, or are employed at jobs that pay less than a living wage. Workers who clean motel rooms, wait on tables at Denny’s, cashier at grocery stores, or greet customers at Walmart typically pay no income tax if they have dependents. Walmart actually instructs its new workers on how to apply for such government benefits as subsidized housing, free school lunches for their kids, and food assistance for their home. Walmart knows that it doesn’t pay a living wage. The family of its founder, by contrast, the Walton family, has assets of $69 billion, which just about equals the assets of the entire bottom 30 percent of the U.S. population.

Romney seems to imagine that rich people who pay a significant amount of income tax are supporting the government by dint of their own hard work. He neglects to notice how handsomely the government is supporting them. All of the beneficiaries of businesses that pay less than a living wage are being supplied workers by government subsidy. Without housing and food assistance, poor people would be too busy trying to stay warm, feed themselves, and keep out the rain to show up to make beds at motels, wait on tables, or greet customers at Walmart.

More directly, the government supports whole industries with tax dollars. Most basic research is done by the government and then turned over to private enterprise at little cost. So anyone making money from computers, cell phones, and the Internet, all resulting from government research, is a beneficiary of government favor. Basic medical research is done for the most part by government-supported institutions, which is an enormous subsidy of the pharmaceutical industry. An additional subsidy is the provision of Medicare Part D that disallows the government from bargaining for lower drug prices. The constraint on bargaining costs taxpayers about $50 billion a year.

Mining companies pay below-market rates for extractions from government-owned land, and ranchers and farmers in the west pay below-market rates for the water they need. General tax revenues pay for most of the roadways and road repairs in the United States, not the tax on gasoline, so the automotive industry which paid for Romney’s affluent youth is a major beneficiary of government favor. The nuclear industry exists only through government subsidies and loan guarantees. Our economy’s financial sector, which garners 40 percent of corporate profits, would have imploded but for massive government bailouts.

In short, most of the 47 percent who pay no income tax are hard-working Americans or people dependent on Social Security after a lifetime of hard work. The very rich, by contrast, benefit from government favors out of all proportion to their economic and social contributions.

September 18, 2012

This week's Election Tuesday post is by Ian Bogost, author of Persuasive Games and Newsgames(with Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer), among others. It discusses political games and communication (or lack thereof).

Recently, the journalist Monroe Anderson asked Obama strategist David Axelrod “why so many voters were so clueless as to how President Obama had spent the
first two years of his first term.” Axelrod's response: “information gridlock.”
Essentially, the White House hadn't been able to communicate effectively with
the public about its accomplishments. Anderson siphoned this state
of affairs through the lens of games, asking two speakers on a newsgames panel
at a journalism conference how games might be used to communicate “Obamacare”
more effectively. The two responses are pretty good game designs. One involves
simulating the experience of different illnesses: “Let them walk through and let
them see it with the Obamacare version and without the Obamacare version, not
telling them which is and which isn't.” The other is a game about “how to
survive without health insurance...People will say, 'Oh, wow'; if these things
happened to me, I'd be screwed.”

In the presidential election of 2004, Gonzalo
Frasca and I helped create the first ever official US presidential candiate
game, for then-Democratic sweetheart Howard Dean. Several more officially
endorsed games appeared that election cycle. In 2008, only a couple surfaced,
including Pork Invaders, a silly Space Invaders knock-off from the McCain
campaign. This year, as far as I know, not a single official political game was
conceived or created. Meanwhile, the two designs Anderson's panelists suggest
are just the sort I love, just the sort I have been advocating for in my
research and my game development for years. The problem is this: neither the
Obama White House nor the Obama campaign would ever make games like the ones
Anderson's interviewees suggest. That's not because the designs are bad;
ironically, it's because they are good. As I've arguedbefore,
the representation of policy choices and their outcomes is anathema to politics,
because the latter is concerned more with politicking than with
policy, with campaigning over legislating. This is a different sort of
failure to communicate, one rooted in the widespread misconception of politics
as a matter of professionals getting, keeping, or losing their jobs, rather than
citizens living in (hopefully) better and better communities. Meanwhile, the
administration and the campaigns alike keep Facebooking and Tweeting their
soundbites, hoping two sentence answers will be enough.

September 04, 2012

September brings us another month closer to the 2012 election (where did summer go?). We'll be posting election-related content each Tueday as we count down to Election Day.

Today's Election Tuesday post is by Steven M. Schneider and Kirsten A. Foot, authors of Web Campaigning, and explains how the use of the Web in political campaigns has changed (and also stayed the same) since the early 2000s.

The
2012 campaign represents the high-water mark of online political action. The sheer quantity of Web sites and online apps dwarf what we saw online
just two or three cycles ago. We have moved far from 1990s-era “virtual
billboards” (D’Alessio, 1997), and even well beyond the email-address gathering,
volunteer-form laden, “roll your own Website” era exemplified by the 2004 Dean
campaign (Trippi, 2004). It is safe to say that, beginning with the 2008
Obama primary and general election campaign efforts, and spreading almost
ubiquitously by 2012 to many federal and even state-level candidates, online
structures facilitating connection through social networking sites like
Facebook have redefined the candidate Web site.Yet in many
respects, much of what we see in the 2012 cycle -- especially on the Web --
extends what we observed in the early 2000s. Hardly revolutionary: We
might even call the 2012 online campaign “politics as usual” (Margolis &
Resnick, 2000).

In Web
Campaigning, we argued that what campaigns do on the
web can be analyzed through four practices: informing, involving, connecting,
and mobilizing—and that these practices remain relatively stable over time. As the Web has moved from its producer-centric first generation to a
platform emphasizing sharing and co-production, Web producers have increasingly
sought to mobilize site visitors and to connect them with other supporters and
organizations, rather than simply involve or inform them. Mobilization as a
practice, first hinted at in the 2000 McCain primary campaign, became the
dominant motif in the 2008 Obama campaign, and is the primary practice in many
2012 efforts.

As a
result of the dramatic expansion of mobilizing, several techniques that emerged
in 2008 have become de rigueur in 2012. The familiar Facebook and
Twitter icons invite visitors to interact with their friends and followers,
pushing campaign materials into a realm far outside the control and oversight
of candidate organizations. “Sharing” is the behavioral successor to the
“linking” technique we observed in 2004 and before. In the 2012 cycle,
campaigns engage in what we called “co-production” far beyond what was imagined
or thought strategic in the formerly-cautious world of campaign Web managers.

Finally,
we should comment on the area of tremendous growth (and to date, largely
unexplored) online campaigning: the world of the apps. As our online
world moves beyond the Web to cloistered apps accessed from tablets and smart
phones, the challenge for scholars to identify practices and define techniques
requires new methods and new tools. While scholarship from the 2000s
focused on the Web as an object of study; scholarship in this decade and the
next should focus on the screen as the object of study. Such an effort
will require new approaches to observation and analysis.

D'Alessio, David. 1997. "Use of the World Wide Web in the 1996 U.S.
Election." Electoral Studies 16 (4):489-500.

I grew up in a very liberal neighborhood in Minneapolis, MN, surrounded by people who thought that Paul Wellstone and Jesse Jackson were clearly the two most qualified men in the country to be President. Yet, virtually all of those people fell neatly in-line behind the Democratic Party nominee every November—and in most years, by the time the Spring caucuses rolled around they had already thrown their support behind a slightly less palatable, but perhaps more electable, candidate.

In short, they were faced with the same set of options now confronting Republican voters; when, and how, should one vote “strategically”? We all vote strategically—or for candidates who aren’t our first choice—and it is really a very rational approach to a winner-take-all election. The problem is that strategic voting ultimately relies on a self-fulfilling prophecy that can cause voters to abandon preferred candidates prematurely.

Take the Georgia election in the upcoming March 6 Super Tuesday primary. Recent polling in Georgia, according to the analysis by Nate Silver at the New York Times 538 blog, showed that Newt Gingrich holds a sizeable lead in Georgia, his home state and a place where he remains popular. Clearly he will win the state on Super Tuesday, right?

If the election were held in a vacuum, perhaps. Unfortunately for Gingrich, those Georgia voters have been feeling significant pressure leading up to Super Tuesday to vote strategically. Gingrich’s candidacy is no longer taken seriously outside of Georgia. Which means that, heading into Super Tuesday, those pro-Gingrich voters will have basically three choices:

1) Vote for Gingrich, despite the fact that it looks increasingly unlikely that Gingrich can win the nomination.

2) Vote for their second-place candidate—most analysts believe this to be Rick Santorum—because he has a more realistic chance to win the nomination.

3) Vote for whichever candidate they believe to be the inevitable nominee—most analysts believe this to be Mitt Romney—because of a desire to end the primary process quickly.

The irony, of course, is that Gingrich might have a chance to win the nomination if not for strategic voting concerns—or “momentum” as the pundits often call it. Until recently, after all, Gingrich had a sizeable lead in Georgia, and was seen as a viable contender in the other Super Tuesday states, especially Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and the various Western caucuses. But as voters in Michigan watched a few thousand caucus-goers in Colorado and Minnesota choose Santorum as their preferred non-Romney candidate, they decided to follow suit. And now, as Santorum is coming off a respectable 2nd place showing in Michigan, and holding a small lead in the Ohio polls, he has positioned himself as the “only viable” non-Romney candidate in all of those other Southern and Western states. This has in turn left Georgia as Gingrich’s last chance to demonstrate his “viability”—or perhaps as the place where the self-fulfilling prophecy of Gingrich’s doom finally comes to fruition.

August 18, 2011

Twenty years ago, on a hot summer day in late August, communist hardliners staged a coup to depose Mikhail Gorbachev. They rejected Gorbachev’s reforms of perestroika that had led to political liberalization if economic uncertainly, and to widespread questioning of communist orthodoxy. Indeed, on August 20, 1991, Gorbachev and leaders of several other Soviet republics were to meet in Moscow to sign a new union treaty that would have decentralized power from the Kremlin. To hardliners, this was an unacceptable step toward the dissolution of the USSR. On August 19, 1991, they placed Gorbachev under house arrest at his summer home in Crimea and sent troops and tanks into Moscow to secure power.

I “watched” the coup from television in the US. The Gorbachev reforms enabled the presence of cable TV, telephone and other media as never before under Soviet power. I had spent a lot of time in the USSR in the late 1980s during perestroika. What heady times! Every week and every day brought a new development in Soviet society, economy and polity. Many intellectuals, even conservative intellectuals, at first embraced fully those reforms. They USSR had stagnated under Leonid Brezhnev’s leadership. The economy grew slowly, consumer goods were in short supply, and ideological controls over the cultural sphere led to a gray and colorless daily life.

Such leading scientists as Zhores Alferov embraced the Gorbachev reforms to reinvigorate science and education. I met with Alferov several times in Moscow and could feel his excitement over the future of the reforms. (Physicist Andrei Sakharov also embraced perestroika, but he pushed Gorbachev to go further, to embrace true democracy and willingly permit the rise of other political parties.)

But instead of a rejuvenated USSR, the economy went into free fall, and the hardliners determined to “save” the Soviet Union. Fortunately, their efforts failed. Reformers, including Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federation, railed the public in the streets and turned the army against the coup plotters who wavered and gave up.

The Soviet Union did break up at the end of 1991, but with it the scientific enterprise lost its financial support and esteemed status. Alferov reaffirmed his communist affiliation in the 1990s to save his beloved science from what he believed were misguided policies of the Russian government.

July 22, 2011

On my recent book tour supporting Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age, audiences from Montréal, QC to Washington, DC asked incisive, insightful questions about the relationship between information technology and social justice. Audience members were particularly interested in how the high-tech equity agenda that I develop in the book applies to the thrilling revolts that took place across the Middle East and North Africa this spring. They wanted to know: Does the Arab Spring prove that social media fosters radical political change?

Social media were undoubtedly useful tools in the recent pro-democracy uprisings, and will continue to play a role in liberation movements around the globe. As Xiaolin Zhuo, Barry Wellman, and Justine Yu point out in their article “Egypt: The First Internet Revolt?,” published in the July 2011 issue of Peace Magazine, networked tools such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs facilitated rapid mobilization of protesters, developed a sense of community under a repressive regime with limited freedom of the press, and garnered global attention once protests had started.

However, as Zhuo, Wellman and Yu show, organized groups, informal networks, and formal organizing training played an equally (if not more) crucial role in these not-so-spontaneous protests. Established political groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and the April 6 Youth Movement were central to organizing the Tahrir Square protests. Word of mouth and television spread more information and mobilized more protesters than social media and internet sources. Egyptian activists received face-to-face training and support from international allies such as CANVAS (the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies) in Serbia. So social media supported and supplemented on-the-ground organizing, rather than simply unleashing democratic forces. Even in Asmaa Mahfouz's now-famous video blog, which some credit with launching the January 25 protests, she informs watchers that she's to get off the internet, because she’s on her way to hand out fliers in the street.

In cases beyond Egypt, the use of social media has markedly negative impacts on radical organizing, as Evgeny Morozov has persuasively argued in the cases of China, where the authoritarian regime deploys a small army of internet users to post pro-government propaganda, or Iran, where the Ahmadinejad government used internet and mobile device records to track down dissidents after the 2009-2010 election protests.

The focus on technology in the international media may also misrepresent the character of liberation movements -- hiding, for example, the important role played by women in the Arab Spring. Robin Morgan argues in “Women of the Arab Spring,” her article in the most recent Ms. Magazine, that when the mainstream media talked blogs, Facebook and Twitter, they focused on Zeid Al Heni and Google employee Wael Ghonim, not Tunisian feminist blogger Lina Ben Mhenni or even Asmaa Mahfouz and her viral video blog. That the face of “Facebook Revolutions” tends to be male says more about our perceptions of technology than about the reality of who is using online tools for progressive change.

While social media undoubtedly shaped the unfolding of liberation struggles in the Middle East and North Africa, to say that these were Facebook or Twitter revolutions is misleading. The focus on technical aspects of the Arab Spring marginalizes and minimizes the role of traditional organizing and downplays the risks and commitments made by ordinary people who put themselves, embodied and in real time, on the line for freedom.

The most troubling aspect of the myopic focus on “Liberation Technology” is the suggestion that if you add internet, you can produce instant revolution.* We need better stories about the relationship between technology and social change. As I write in Digital Dead End,

[W]e do not have many stories that show us how hard, and how rewarding, it is to actually forge and maintain alliances across difference...Easier just to posit some mythical “Movement Moment” when differences are put aside, to deify a superhuman charismatic leader who turns divisiveness into coalition, or to mourn the sacrificial lambs who become a rallying cry for unity. Easier to ignore or forget the day-to-day heroism of ordinary people coming together to transform their world...This unattainable myth misrepresents collective process; it is a pale imitation of what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called "the long and bitter, but beautiful struggle for a new world.” We should demand more.

In the book, I also describe a model of liberatory technology education my collaborators and I called "Popular Technology." Grounded in popular education, it focuses on resisting oppression, building coalition across difference, and fostering participatory decision-making. Fighting exploitation, imperialism and violence may sound so last century, but there simply is no tech-fix for justice. As Andrew Feenberg reminds us, technology is not a destiny; it is a site of struggle.

*See, for example, New York Times reporting on the US State Department's “Wi-Fi in a Box” project.